IViR is pleased to announce that
Dr. Cecilia Rikap
will give a lecture entitled
Intellectual Monopoly amid the AI and Cloud age
on 22 November 2024
The world’s largest corporations are knowledge and information predators. They turned these intangibles into assets and craft narratives that further enable them to capture value from society at large. They capture knowledge co-produced with other organizations and shape the pathways of science and technology. These intellectual monopolies continuously garner intellectual rents and stifle innovation as they curtail knowledge diffusion. Among intellectual monopolies, Amazon, Microsoft and Google control the whole AI value chain from the required datasets and research networks to the start-ups producing AI applications. It all runs on their clouds, depends on their models, relies on their funding or is indirectly influenced by their control of the field. Mushrooming AI startups, sooner or later, integrate these three giants’ spheres of control, depend on their corporate venture capital investments or simply rely on their clouds to code and offer computing services. As organizations from around the world adopt the cloud and AI, these cloud giants solidify their intellectual monopolies. Are we still on time to build another digital stack that puts the people and planet ahead of corporate profits?
Dr. Cecilia Rikap is an Associate Professor in Economics and the Head of Research at the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose of the University College London (UCL). Until joining UCL, she was a Senior Lecturer in International Political Economy (IPE) at City, University of London and programme director of the BSc. in IPE at the same university. She is a tenure researcher of the CONICET, Argentina’s national research council, and associate researcher at COSTECH lab, Université de Technologie de Compiègne.
Rikap is the author of the award-winning book Capitalism, Power and Innovation: Intellectual Monopoly Capitalism Uncovered and co-author of the book The Digital Innovation Race in which Rikap and her co-author anticipate the politics and economics of AI that we are witnessing today.
Cecilia’s research is rooted in the international political economy of science and technology and the economics of innovation. She studies the rising concentration of intangible assets leading to the emergence of intellectual monopolies among others from digital and pharma industries. Her research highlights the unequal distribution of intellectual (including data) rents and the effects of intellectual monopolization on the knowledge commons, development and rising geopolitical tensions. Her most recent work focuses on artificial intelligence and the cloud, Big Tech companies’ dominance of these technologies, their interplay with other multinational corporations and the effects of Big Tech’s extended intellectual monopolization on digital sovereignty. Rikap has experience advising policymakers in Argentina, Brazil, France, the United Kingdom and the United States as well as dozens of civil society organizations on these matters.
Practical details
Date: 22 November 2024
Time: 15:30 – 16:45 CET (Amsterdam)
Place:
– IViR Room, REC A5.24, Nieuwe Achtergracht 166, 1018 WV Amsterdam.
– Online via Zoom (you will receive the Zoomlink via e-mail on the morning of the lecture).
See also the flyer.